A DOS Emulator tips up for the Raspberry Pi

A BLOKE who likes to play around with old PC games on more recent hardware has built a DOS Emulator for the Raspberry Pi computer.

Patrick Alto, who goes by the handle Homebrew Coder Pate, previously released a DOS Emulator for the Nintendo DS. Now he has posted a release of his DOS Emulator for the diminutive ARM based Raspberry Pi computer.

DOS emulators can be used to run old PC DOS programs on other systems that don't have x86 processors. Since most people in their right minds don't want to run most ancient desktop PC operating systems like Windows 3.1 or nearly 25 year old office productivity applications like Lotus 123 or the early versions of Microsoft Word, the main use for DOS emulators anymore is to run old PC games like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem and others. And that's exactly what this DOS Emulator for the Raspberry Pi is designed to do.

At present the Raspberry Pi DOS Emulator supports the following features:

CPU: 80486 processor, including the protected mode features (for running DOS4GW games) but without virtual memory support. The emulation runs at a speed of around 20MHz 80486 (which equals a 40MHz 80386) machine.